[Beowulf] Containers in HPC

[Brian Dobbins]

> Can  someone clarify for me are containers another form of virtualized
> systems? Or are they isolated environments running on bare metal?
>

Others have answered this in a more complete and technical way, but when I
end up talking with scientists about containers, I tend to reverse the
question - *everyone* asks, "What are containers?" and "What is the
cloud?", and since they're big topics with some nuance, I reverse it and
just describe what those areas let us do for the applications in question.

  In our case, some of our applications have complicated build
environments, requiring specific versions of libraries, compilers, etc.  If
we can containerize them, the end-user (a scientist) doesn't need to worry
about all the complexity.  They can focus on their science, while we
provide software, via a container, that 'just works'.  At least in theory.
;-)

  - Brian

>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20190523/21971869/attachment-0001.html>